You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Challenging traditional approaches to the study of American political history, the essays in this book establish the significance of the institutional framework of the electoral system and argue the importance of its interaction with political conditions.
An overview of the basic concepts and methods of political research, including measurement operationalization; surveys; indexing; content analysis; sampling; rational choice analysis; and univariate, bivariate, and multivariate analysis. For each method, Ethridge (political science, U. of Wisconsin) offers a brief introduction introducing the topic and then presents an excerpt or two or research papers utilizing that particular analytic method. Also included is a brief final comment by Ethridge examining particular issues raised by the authors of the particular examples. A final chapter explores some of the current controversies of attempting to apply scientific methods to the study of politics. c. Book News Inc.
Rusk (political science, University of Illinois in Chicago) presents an historical picture of voting behavior, collecting data from the last 200 years and discerning the historical patterns. Chapters look at: election laws and suffrage; voting participation; presidential, house, senate, and gubernatorial voting; and, measures of voting behavior. Each chapter includes an introductory essay explaining the data, its significance, and the historical context surrounding it. c. Book News Inc.
The new edition of this popular textbook provides a comprehensive, accessible introduction to public opinion in the United States and describes how public opinion data are collected, how they are used, and the role they play in the U.S. political system. Bardes and Oldendick introduce students to the history of polling and explain the factors a good consumer of polls should know in order to evaluate public opinion data. Public Opinion: Measuring the American Mind is the only text to devote significant space to the history.
Today we are politically polarized as never before. The presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 will be remembered as two of the most contentious political events in American history. Yet despite the recent election upheaval, The American Voter Revisited discovers that voter behavior has been remarkably consistent over the last half century. And if the authors are correct in their predictions, 2008 will show just how reliably the American voter weighs in, election after election. The American Voter Revisited re-creates the outstanding 1960 classic The American Voter---which was based on the presidential elections of 1952 and 1956---following the same format, theory, and mode of analysis as t...
Concentrating on the American historical experience, the contributors to this volume apply quantitative techniques to the study of popular voting behavior. Their essays address problems of improving conceptualization and classifications of voting patterns, accounting for electoral outcomes, examining the nature and impact of constraints on participation, and considering the relationship of electoral behavior to subsequent public policy. The writers draw upon various kind of data: time series of election returns, census enumerations that provide the social and economic characteristics of voting populations, and individual poll books and other lists that indicate whom the individual voters act...
Networks of Collective Action: A Perspective on Community Influence Systems develops a theoretically informed research framework for the structural analysis of social systems. To this end, special attention is given to two fundamental issues in structural analysis: First, how does one most usefully define or identify the elementary units, be they individuals, corporate actors, or population subgroups, that comprise a given social system, and in what ways should these elementary units be characterized or differentiated from one another? And, second, what are the relational modalities by which these actors are linked to one another in ways that are relevant to understanding how their individua...
The Handbook of Legislative Research, a comprehensive summary of the results of research on nineteenth and twentieth-century legislatures, is itself a landmark in the evolution of legislative studies. Gathered here are surveys by leading scholars in the field, each providing inventory of an important subfield, an extensive bibliography, and a systematic assessment of what has been accomplished and what directions future research must take.
This book provides a rare view of a creative scholar at work during a highly productive phase of his career. It shows him as an innovator, theorist, methodologist, “missionary,” critic, and scientist, but he remains, withal, in his fashion, a humanist. He believes that institutions and processes—particularly law, politics, and scholarship—are best understood in human terms. With Holmes, he believes that law is a prediction of what courts will do; hence, to understand law it is necessary to understand judicial behavior. A full explanation of a judge’s behavior would take into account his health (both physical and mental), his personality, his culture and society, and his ideology. G...